Weekend Words: Alliance
"Alliance: In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's pockets that they cannot separately plunder a third."
Within hours of its announcement, the alliance between Ted Cruz and John Kasich to defeat Donald Trump all but crumbled. Will Trump win it all in Indiana?
Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations—entangling alliances with none.
—Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address
Alliance: In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other’s pockets that they cannot separately plunder a third.
—Ambrose Bierce
Diplomacy means all the wicked devices of the Old World, spheres of influence, balances of power, secret treaties, triple alliances, and, during the interim period, appeasement of Fascism.
—Barbara Tuchman
Art and Religion are, then two roads by which men escape from circumstances to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance. Art and Religion are means to a similar state of mind.
—Clive Bell, Art
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. … A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.”
—Martin Luther King
Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can’t sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can’t sleep with the window open.
—George Bernard Shaw
Marriage is the alliance of two people, one of whom never remembers birthdays and the other who never forgets them.
—Ogden Nash
Ambrose lived in and for conversation; he rejoiced in the whole intricate art of it… the changes of alliance, the betrayals, the diplomatic revolutions, the waxing and waning of dictatorships that could happen in an hour’s session about a table.
—Evelyn Waugh, Put Out More Flags
At 8:23 there seemed every chance of a lasting alliance starting between Florin and Guilder.
At 8:24 the two nations were very close to war.
—William Goldman, The Princess Bride
But a bad marriage can dissolve in a welter of resentment and acrimony. I’ve seen that, too, in my own miserable and disastrous attempt at making another person happy. And it’s never one person’s fault. It’s the sum total of a thousand little irritations, disagreements, idiotic details that in a sound alliance would simply be disregarded, or forgotten in the healing act of making love.
—Rosamunde Pilcher, Wild Mountain Thyme
